


sunflower seeds

by 8611



Series: Variables and Controls [2]
Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Backstory, F/F, Genderswap, girl!Bond, girl!Q
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-08
Updated: 2013-01-08
Packaged: 2017-11-24 05:05:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/630718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/8611/pseuds/8611
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>M offers Q the same job she’s always had. M offers Bond the same job she’s always had, but it’s personal, even more so than before. M doesn’t see a favorite son in Bond.</p><p>M sees herself in Bond.</p><p>(more genderswap!AU.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	sunflower seeds

**Author's Note:**

> Because it turns out I think these two are pretty awesome and evidently needed to write more about them. 
> 
> Quick note – I screwed up the age Bond is orphaned at (I said 8, it’s 11 in canon) but didn’t realize until I’d finished writing this, and it wasn’t an easy change because of the timeline I’d set up, so I left it unchanged. Sorry. D:

Some things remain constant. Controls. 

Q is still born in a hospital in North London. Still grows up in Hendon. Still has glasses, stays skinny and tall. Still knows computers like she knows breathing.

Bond is still born in one of the spare bedrooms at Skyfall. Still spends her first eight years running across the moor with her father’s two stocky labs, hunting dogs that would never hurt her. 

Q’s life deviates later than Bond’s. The variables start later, and are never quite as large, as far ranging. Bond knows her own path before Q even hits uni. There are 16 even, linear years between them. That does not change. 

Bond only gets to hide in the priest hole for six hours, before people start making a fuss, worry over her. Kincade has to go fish her out, even though he thinks the whole thing is preposterous. 

“Let the girl grieve,” he’d said.

“She shouldn’t be alone down there, in the dirt,” an aunt had said.

Bond has dirt on her cheeks from wiping away tears when Kincade carries her out, and her hair is messy and full of knots and one of the dogs comes with her, tail wagging because it’s just a dog and doesn’t know what’s going on, what has happened. 

Q still goes to the same primary school, the same secondary school, still goes to King’s for computer science. Still wears the same short hair and thick glasses. 

Bond doesn’t go to Eton. Doesn’t read military history at Oxford. Bond gets shipped between relatives for a few years, shuffled between houses in the country and houses in the city. She sneers at relatives and snaps at them in the kind of singsong French that her mother spoke, and learns to be angry much earlier. 

Bond gets dropped at Cheltenham when she’s 11, because it’s easier to deal with ten thousand pounds a year in tuition than an angry, broken little girl without a keel to balance her. She reads Russian literature at Cambridge and doesn’t join the Navy. 

Q still gets out of uni at 21. Still works for SIS because M offers her a chance to make up for shoddy hacking the night of her father’s death. 

(One lecturer, in one of her programming classes, doesn’t bother to lean her name, calls her _love_ instead. She is the only girl in the class. One deviation. One variable.)

Bond learns to wrap herself in quiet smiles and pretty dresses and wide eyes and pretend to be round and soft when she’s hard and cracked. Bond learns to use her own body to her advantage. Bond learns that if you appear as exactly what everyone expects you to be, they don’t give you a second look.

Bond learns that it’s easier to fly under the radar if you’re pretty and quiet. Bond keeps her anger, and her intelligence, and her sharp edges to herself. 

M sees those edges though, when she walks in on a operation being run by a lower rung, just the field agent department, and stops to watch. Bond is fresh and new, and already she loves getting the job done.

M watches, and sees another little girl who has had to learn to be pleasant when she’d rather be tearing out throats.

M watches Bond, and in time, picks her up to be one of her own.

M offers Q the same job she’s always had. M offers Bond the same job she’s always had, but it’s personal, even more so than before. M doesn’t see a favorite son in Bond.

M sees herself in Bond.

\---

Life doesn’t balance like equations do. When you upset one side, change something, life just keeps going. 

Q is in jeans that are practically painted on and an overlarge coat and standing in a [field of sunflower seeds](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/multimedia/archive/00066/AiWeiwei_66851b.jpg) at the Tate. Bond watches the way she moves, spindly and long limbed, and knows in that moment that Q was never subjected to endless ballet classes as a child, that she probably had the run of the neighborhood and escaped from angry old ladies by laughing, jumping over hedges, because she’s always been tall. 

Bond doesn’t know who Q is yet, so when they end up standing side by side in the dark in one of [the Tanks](http://www.wallpaper.com/galleryimages/17053323/gallery/04_tate-tanks.jpg), videos playing on the curved walls around them, she tries to move away after Q fires off something about _that’s the point, of all of this, you let go when you’re done, when you hand it off, and it’s the viewer who sees what they want to in your art after that_. 

“007.”

Bond turns back to Q, and in the dark her glasses are lit up by the glow from the projections. There is a soft smile on her lips, and then Bond knows. Knows that this skinny girl is her new Q. 

“Aren’t you a bit young?” Bond asks, raising an eyebrow. 

“Aren’t you a bit old?” Q replies, turning towards Bond, and Bond can see that she’s wearing some kind of velvet blazer under the coat, over a loose shirt, long necklace hanging over that. It’s all very modern, she’s on the cutting edge of something, a modern day Sloane Ranger, all wrapped in her layers. 

“Youth before beauty,” Bond says, and Q frowns.

“I think you’ve got that backwards,” Q says.

“You’d be incorrect.”

“I rarely am.”

“Mark the day down in your diary.”

Bond just watches Q, takes her in, tries to make sense of the baby genius who has made this whole city her own, hauled it under her hands and into her mind, strung alone lines of data and code. 

She takes Q’s arm, leads her out of the Tanks and back towards that field of sunflower seeds, and they stand on the edge of it, and Q produces an envelope and a small, streamlined box from her satchel. No one watches them, not when there’s an ocean of seeds stretched out across the gentle rise of the floor. 

“Q,” Bond says when she slips away from Q, with a smirk. 

“Stay safe,” Q says, still watching the seeds for a moment before turning to Bond. “And do try to bring my equipment back in one piece.”

 _Brave new world_ , this girl in her skinny jeans and velvet jacket, and Bond likes it. 

\---

One lecturer, in one of Q’s programming classes, doesn’t bother to lean her name, calls her _love_ instead. She is the only girl in the class.

It startles her, although she supposes it shouldn’t. Q has grown up with skateboards and video games and comics and she’s gotten the odd comment from people from time to time – you’re a _girl_ , why are you doing boy things? – but that’s all they are for her, odd. Her friends had never cared. Her parents had never cared. If anyone ever cared, Q figured that she didn’t need to care about them. 

She knows objectively that she’s slotted herself into something that people view as a man’s world, this world of computers, but it’s what she wants, and this idiot, this lecturer who can’t be bothered to learn her name, actually makes her angry, after she thinks about it. She’s smarter than he is. She could sink him in a single moment, bankrupt him, ruin him, but you can’t do that.

You can’t ruin people, because they’re always attached to other people. There are always strings. There will always be things like this man’s wife, his children. 

Q doesn’t have the anger Bond does, that constant thrum that keeps her moving, but there are flares of it, solar waves in Q’s vision. 

She can ignore them for the most part. The people in her life who matter will never care. So she sticks to those people. 

When she tells her mother about it, years later, her mother just sighs, shakes her head, _ducky, those people don’t know what they’re talking about, they’re useless_. Q is inclined to agree. 

Bond turns eleven and she’s angry and broken and she turns eighteen and she smiles and tilts her head and wears her hair in a perfect braid and says _oh yes, Cambridge, I’m very excited_ even though she doesn’t give a fuck where she goes. Her father had been in the Navy, that’s what she wants to do, but she knows that she’s not expected to do that.

She graduates and still doesn’t care, but of all the crazy places SIS is recruiting, so why the hell not. She figures that she’ll spend her life going over very wordy, very secret documents, live on family money in London, and deal with the boring life that she’s been strapped into.

The recruits they bring in (there are twenty of them) all have to go through testing. Paper, computer, physical. 

Bond evidently has a spark in her somewhere though, because she is not assigned a desk, or handed paperwork, or told to tease information out of captured communications. 

Instead, someone says _how would you like to serve Queen and country?_

That’s pretty much all Bond’s wanted to do her whole life, even back when she was young enough to confuse her father’s line of work with pirating. 

She likes the PPK. It fits well in her hands, wide palms and long fingers. 

She likes the rush of adrenaline. 

And she doesn’t mind the first kill, although it sets her on edge for weeks. Collateral, that was never an issue. But when asked to, it had been harder. Not asked to – someone had told her to put a man down, bullet to the brain. So she did. 

This is not a deviation. The control remains. Bond’s first kill is strange. Her second is much easier. She has bruises and bloodied hands from the first one, and a cold smile from the second time. It’s a well-worn story. She takes to her 00 status like a fish to water. 

Here is what stays the same, the equation unchanged, molecules and numbers all in a line:

Bond knows what it’s like to have and take life, under your hands. Bond doesn’t think about it, just does. Q fails to cover her tracks one night because she’s in some deep headspace after the death of her father and M offers her the keys to the kingdom, or the option to throw the key away. Q chooses a basement workshop in Vauxhall Cross. Bond is a blunt instrument, and she loves it. Q has the world at her fingertips, and she makes it hers. 

These are the variables:

Bond is not allowed to be angry, to mourn, to break. So she dresses it up in pretty smiles and _yes ma’am_ and _no ma’am_ and cuts her teeth in London, with hands that fit the small grip of the PPK excellently. 

Q is a bit sharper, a bit less quiet, because she doesn’t care if it’s just a letter now, everyone will always know her name. 

\---

Bond knows what it’s like to be young and have money and all of London at your fingertips. She assumes the same of Q, assumes she’s fast and hard and knows what it’s like to teeter home late at night, laughing with friends, heels in one hand and cigarette in the other. 

This is a mistake. She was wrong, in that first impression. Q couldn’t be any further from Sloane Square, she’s the South Pole by comparison. She’s not exactly the salt of the earth, Bond knows from the way she talks that she’s a born and bred Londoner, and no one from London could ever be said to be fully normal, but she’s not the kind of London that Bond was thinking. 

“We are you from?” Bond asks one day, when she’s leaning on Q’s worktable, watching her dig around in a monitor, wires sticking out one side and Q’s fingers flying, a pair of delicate pliers clamped between her teeth. Bond is honestly curious. There’s something about Q that she quite likes, something bright and strong, like the silver wire Q’s got a roll of by her elbow. 

“London,” Q mumbles around the pliers, frowning at something in the monitor. 

“I’m aware,” Bond says, purses her lips. “ _Where_ in London?”

“It’s not important,” Q says. “Here’s a better question – do you have some secret Scottish accent in there somewhere?”

Bond frowns, because no, she does not. Her father might have, Kincade certainly did, but her nanny didn’t and she’d been young enough when she got shipped south to be able to mold her voice into something that meant she was boring, she didn’t stick out. 

“No,” Bond says, and then, “I could just look in your file.”

“Have at it,” Q says. “Although, you’re going to have to figure out which one to look in.”

Bond looks over at her, really looks at her. There have been occasions, embarrassing slip ups, when it’s been discovered that two files in their databases actually go to the same person. They’re rare though, usually they’re more on top of that. 

“And just how many files do you have?” Bond asks. 

“That the agency knows about? One. Well, I mean, they know about the other three, but they’re not connected to me.” 

“So you’ll tell me that you have secret files, which I could go to M about, but you won’t tell me where you’re from?”

“My real life belongs to me, not to SIS.”

Q huffs out a little sigh of annoyance through her nose, and flips her hands to grab a bunch of the wires, yanking them out. They come out with a wrenching, shrieking noise, and Q pushes the monitor face down, takes the back off, and Bond’s surprised at how fast she takes the thing apart, down to its bare bits. 

“I’d hate to annoy you,” Bond notes dryly. 

Q just looks up at her, grins, and puts the pliers back in her mouth before returning to the monitor. 

\---

Bond spends three blissful months fucking and getting fucked, getting pissed, laying on warm sand and staring at the stars, lips sunburnt and kissed and she doesn’t put her hair up once, lets it fall down past her shoulders, lets it get steadily longer and more sun-bleached. 

When people stare at her it’s because they see a rich woman on holiday, and she likes that. No one expects anything else out of her, because to everyone in the world she’s either just another tourist, or, even better, she’s dead. She hides her eyes behind a pair of dark aviators, but doesn’t bother hiding her scars, because honestly, what’s the point? She’d have to wear a wetsuit around all the time and there’s absolutely no fun in that. 

She flirts between drinks, doesn’t sleep, except for when she feels like taking the kind of drugs that’ll knock her out. She thinks, briefly, that her aunt – the one who had dragged her out of the priest hole, the one who sat in her back garden in Belgravia and stared at books under a wide brimmed hat – would be proud of her. She’d probably smirk, _Jemma, I knew you had a bit of the_ right _side of the family in you_ , and Bond sends a mental _fuck you_ to her. 

The men are boring. The woman are giggly. It’s not a challenge. Nothing is, because she doesn’t have anything to challenge her. 

There is an explosion in London, and she tries to be detached, tries not to care, tries to give it up for good, but as always, that’s not going to happen (every time she tries, every single time, that whole resigning thing doesn’t work, because someone ends up dead). 

Breaking into M’s flat has always been stupidly easy. She lounges on one of M’s sofas, her feet up on the arm, and is most of the way through a glass of scotch when M finally shows up, and she doesn’t seem particularly shocked to find Bond there, in her front room. 

“Where the bloody hell have you been?” She snaps, throws her coat at Bond, and she catches it before it can hit her, dumps it over the back of the sofa. 

“Enjoying death,” Bond says, because this is always the same. 

“Yes, well, reports of that seem to have been greatly exaggerated,” M says, and she comes to loom over Bond. “You look like absolute rubbish. Take a shower, and you can take the spare room, but don’t think for a second that you’re getting anything else. Tanner will collect you in the morning.”

“Very generous,” Bond mutters, and hauls herself up off the sofa, heads upstairs for the bedroom that M doesn’t use as an office or a library, and she knows her way because she’s been here before. 

The next morning Tanner tells Q that the missing 00 has been located ( _-I thought she was KIA? –Minor mix up. – Oh yes, it’s very minor, confusing dead bodies for live ones_.) and that her department will have to have everything mission ready by tomorrow morning. 

Q doesn’t have to go herself. She can meet Bond later, she knows. She could send a minion. But instead she wakes up early on a Saturday, throws on some clothes, takes the Tube south of the river and meets Bond in the dark, and then in a field of tiny grey seeds. 

\---

Kincade is the one to tell her, very gently, about her parents. They had been on holiday in Switzerland, and Bond – Jemma, she’s Jemma back then, Jem to Kincade – just nods, carefully and quietly and then she takes Peel (she can’t find Pitt, he must be out chasing geese) and hides in the priest hole, arms around the dog’s neck, and he sits with her dutifully, snuffing at her hair occasionally. He whines when she starts crying, paws at her, and she grips him tighter, and she wishes in that moment that she could be a dog like him, because then she wouldn’t have to feel like this, all alone, wouldn’t have to cry. 

When Kincade comes to get her ( _Jem, come here, it’s all right now, you can bring Peel with you._ ) she cries harder, squeezes her eyes shut, doesn’t want to leave, wants to say here forever and she shakes her head. Kincade had sighed then, she remembers that, and at the time she thought that he was annoyed with her, but she had realized quite a bit later that he was angry with having to disturb her and bring her back upstairs.

“I’m sorry, wee beastie,” he says, and his lips are tight, and he collects her up because she’s small enough to carry still. 

Peel follows them, wagging his tail, and she spends the rest of the night wrapped in blankets by the fire while family members in the next room try to figure out what to do with her, like she’s a possession to be passed about. 

\---

Bond spots Q at the funeral. She looks almost unnatural, streamlined and in all black, and she’s missing her glasses. Q and Eve talk afterwards, standing on the road through the cemetery, voices hushed, their faces and bodies close together. Bond supposes that she should go talk to them, but instead she walks across the street, opens the heavy gate to the older side of the cemetery, and spends the next few hours walking between graves, under the shade of the trees. She finally settles down on the steps of a grand old mausoleum, the marble cold against her body. She’d come here, once, when she first moved to London. 

She takes off her shoes, and throws them as far away as she can, strips off her tights and tosses them away too, her clutch, her cardigan, until she’s finally there on the muddy steps in nothing but her dress and she hates it, because the last time she was in the dirt she had a dog and trousers and she knew exactly what she felt in that moment. 

This time no one comes to get her though, and she has hours to sort through all the emotions she has about this, things that are twisted and caught up in the barbs surrounding everything that’s happened (Silva, Sévérine, pistols in a shaking grip). Her mind feels like it’s made up of angular puzzle pieces that won’t fit together. 

She takes a cab back to the new building, and stands, barefoot and dirty, in the shooting range. She just keeps firing and firing until she shatters all the images that are swirling through her mind (Skyfall, M, a coffin in the ground) and all she can see is the target, and the gun in her hands. 

That night she sits on the roof of her building and burns the letters that M had written to her, once, years ago, when she was just starting out and M was still soft enough around the edges to try to draw Bond in. 

Neither have been like that for a lifetime now. She watches the pages burn and grimaces when she holds the paper for just a bit too long, feels the flame on the pads of her fingers, and then goes to see how far she can get through a few bottle of wine before she passes out. 

\---

Q got sharper. Q got louder. Q wears skirts when she feels like it, because she feels like it. 

Bond learned to smile. Learned to laugh. Learned to look up at people through her eyelashes and use herself as her first line of defense. 

Bond learned how to draw information out of people with her fingers, and her mouth, and her body, and when she came back to SIS, every time, people were pleased with what she’d done, because she hadn’t had to kill anyone, or maim anyone, just a little night of sex and she’d have everything she needed in her hands. 

She tries to keep count, at first. When she loses track of the number of people she’s slept with she starts counting bodies instead. She loses track of that even faster. There are more cold bodies in her life than warm ones. 

When she’s 18 she thinks that her body makes her a target. By the time she’s 25 she knows that it makes other people a target instead. Her targets. They don’t know, all they see is someone gorgeous, and maybe a bit hard, and they like that, like that she doesn’t give a fuck about their wives (or their husbands, she’s not picky), like that she’s the perfect bit of no-strings-attached. 

Bond knows how to be nothing but smoky curves and seductive smiles, and she gets men to bend to kiss her manicured hands and women to laugh conspiratorially, and she gets everyone to spill their secrets into her hands. 

She lets SIS tell her where to go, who to do, and she comes back. It’s not the Navy, but she forgets about that, and instead she remember the first time M comes to her with one of the small, _TOP SECRET_ files.

“Kenneth Richards,” M says.

“38 years old,” M says. 

“Money laundering to aid known terrorist cells,” M says. 

“I understand,” Bond says, and Richards is her first kill, and this time she gets to work with a gun, and puts a bullet right between his eyes. 

Q’s first kill is remote, and it’s more than one person. Q doesn’t get hyped up on adrenaline, doesn’t go a bit fuzzy afterwards. Q learns how to kill faster than Bond ever did, but Q still doesn’t enjoy it. Bond might, though. Bond might enjoy knowing that she has another weapon now. She might enjoy it very much. 

After Berlin, when Q is sitting in Bond’s open window with bite marks across her shoulder, marking up the tattoo wrapped around her upper arm and a cigarette in her hand, watching something outside that Bond can’t see, Bond asks her again.

“Where are you from?” Bond asks. 

“Not here,” Q says, and turns to Bond to smile. 

“I’m aware,” Bond says, knows enough about Q now to know that she makes herself purposely not fit into a place like Chelsea. “I figure you’re from North London.”

“You’d be correct,” Q says. “Mark this day down in your diary.”

Bond recognizes the echo somehow, and she raises an eyebrow, because of course Q remembers that. Q probably remembers everything that’s ever happened in her life, around her, in her world.

Q doesn’t offer anything else up, and asks a question instead. 

“Who was your first official kill? There are two names in your file, and it doesn’t say who was first.”

“Richards,” Bond says, and fires back. “You told me once that there’s more than one SIS file on you.”

“-----, Quentin; Silver, Xander; one just under an online handle, and one unknown,” Q says, ticking them off on the fingers of free hand. 

“So none of them are you actual file?” Bond says, and Q turns to her, confused, and then understanding dawns across her face.

“Bond,” she says, looking pleased, “have you not looked up my real name?”

“I thought I’d wait for you to tell me,” Bond says. 

“Quentin,” Q says, grinning, something sharp and shark-like. “I was supposed to be a boy and my dad had already fainted twice in the delivery room and my mum was hopped up on painkillers, so they just went with the name they’d agreed on still.” 

“Your name does not actually begin with a Q,” Bond says. 

“Most contrived coincidence ever, I’m aware,” Q says. “My best mate – Adam? You met him that once – he’s called me Q since we met. It’s a shame I can’t tell him about this all.”

“So who was Xander?” Bond asks after Q climbs back into bed, her hair mussed up further by the breeze. 

“Me,” Q says simply. “Name I used online for a bit.”

Bond still calls her Q. She always will, and Q will always call her Bond. Names are a constant, in a way.

“Why do you care so much about where I’m from?” Q asks into the dark later. 

“It matters,” Bond says, and Q doesn’t push it. 

That is still the same. It always will be. Q is from North London and Bond is from Glencoe and that is their rock, their constant, control, and keel. 

\---

Bond doesn’t like how crowded the market is, but Q is easy to keep track of in her stupidly bright parka, and Bond watches as she pops a sample of fudge in her mouth, staring along the row of flavors as she chews slowly. 

Overhead a train goes by, rattling the air and spilling drops of water from the tracks down onto the pavement. It’s a grey day, and cold, but Bond doesn’t mind. Weather has never really been something she’s gotten worked up about. You can’t change it, it’s not worth it. 

Q pushes her way back over to Bond, licking sugar off her lips, and before Bond can stop herself she leans in, kisses the last bits away instead. Q makes a surprised little noise, but one of her hands comes up to wrap around the back of Bond’s neck, her fingers cold against Bond’s skin. 

When Q pulls back her cheeks are red from more than the chill, and she’s looking at Bond a bit like she’s lost her mind. 

“You looked like you needed help,” Bond says, shrugs.

“Likely excuse,” Q says. 

They get paella and sit in the churchyard next door and Q gets in some kind of text message battle, her fork wedged in her mouth, determination on her face. 

“What does Eve want?” Bond asks and Q looks up at her, and she looks so young in that moment, giant parka eating her alive and the tip of her nose red. 

“Not Eve,” Q says, holding the fork with her free hand. “Tanner.”

“Tanner?” Bond asks, frowning, and Q goes back to texting before she finally answers. 

“We need to go stop the world from ending, unfortunately,” Q says. “Or, I do. You can do as you please.”

“Well, in that case, I’ll be stealing a motorbike from the train station and breaking traffic laws to get you down the river in five minutes or less.”

Q raises an eyebrow at Bond. Bond just grins, that tight lipped, one-sided grin of hers, and she makes good on her word to get Q down to Vauxhall Cross in under five minutes. 

Some things won’t ever change.


End file.
